2.1.0 Patch Notes

[Mirajj]

I can read, and know that the hunter changes that are coming are a nice START at helping us out. But it's just a start. A tiny nit to you, GG. After the patch, you'll be gaining 330RAP on HM. It starts out at 110, and you stack it up to 440, which will take a lone hunter about 30 seconds, give or take. Not bad. You can also refresh HM without losing the stack, which is very nice. However, you don't gain 440 on top of the 110 you already get. Now, I could spend a long time typing out what I think needs to be looked at/adjusted with hunters, but I don't feel like wasting my time/typing so I'll just nick a post that Nalyenarie/Starbuck made on the issues and note that it's a really good post. There is more stuff on the EJ forums (The "Hunting Hunters" thread is a great one) that could be looked at, as well.

The core problems, in brief:

* Hunter DPS doesn't scale well. In 5-mans and Karazhan we can compete with the other DPS classes, but as you progress through 25-mans their DPS rises faster than ours does, largely due to synergistic raid buffs/debuffs that increase damage by percentages rather than flat amounts. Obviously we haven't gotten past Maulgar so this isn't personal experience talking, but I've read volumes posted on EJ and other sites from Hunters who are in Serpentshrine and The Eye, and every single one of them expresses this viewpoint.

* It's easy to group other classes to maximize their DPS, but generally not worth it to do so for Hunters - we're a physical damage dealing class that gets no benefit from many melee/AP buffs, and simultaneously a mana using class that gets no benefit from many caster buffs, and putting melee-buffing classes and caster-buffing classes that do benefit Hunters together in the same group is anti-synergistic for everyone except for that lucky Hunter.

* Hunters are mana-starved. Blizzard's solution to this was to spend (waste) loads of stat points on our gear on int and mp5 at the expense of agi/ap/crit (gimping our DPS), and give us Aspect of the Viper, a mana regeneration skill that A) is dependent on us wearing the DPS-gimped int gear andB)takes the place of Aspect of the Hawk (further gimping our DPS due to a boatload of lost AP and no Improved AotH proc). A Hunter of any spec wearing Rogue leather and chain-drinking Fel Mana pots will out-DPS a Hunter wearing Hunter mail, no contest. That is seriously, seriously jacked up. And said leather-clad Hunter will still be busting their butt to just barely keep up with Rogues/Mages/Warlocks, if they do at all. A Shadow Priest helps immensely, but many RLs feel that the damage return on VT is going to be better from a Mage, so Hunters don't always get in an SP group.

* Putting out better DPS than the MT requires low latency and unforgiving attention to timing. Being late by even a hair with a special lowers your DPS. Every time. It adds up fast if you're not 100% on the ball the whole time you're playing (or, again, if your net connection is subpar). A huge, huge chunk of our DPS is autoshotting, which we have no control over aside from being able to turn it on and off, and we have to precisely time a special between each one. Delay an auto by pressing multi/arcane/steady at the wrong instant, or god forbid clobber an auto entirely, and watch your DPS plummet. This, of course, is on top of paying attention to all of the other important stuff going on in a boss fight. Keeping up respectable DPS is just plain stressful for a TBC Hunter!

To summarize: Unforgiving play mechanics, "what-were-they-smoking" itemization, poor scaling compared to other classes, physical damage/mana bar creates fundamental clashes when finding a Hunter's "niche" in raid groups.

Pet survivability in boss encounters was/is a huge issue as well, but they seem to have caught on to that. I can't say for certain how well it will turn out, with the new instacast Mend Pet, the pet Avoidance skill and the Cleave changes/removal of Sweeping Strikes from mobs, but I'm fairly optimistic.

Possible actions Blizzard might consider to fix things if they ever actually played their own game and had a fracking clue about it (some suggestions stolen from an EJ thread, but hey, they're amazing suggestions):
* Re-itemize our gear to the way it was pre-BC: a conservative amount of int, loads of agi/ap/crit, with a healthy mix of hit items for various slots so you can get to the hit cap in a few different ways.
* Add a trainable passive skill that converts a percentage of agi to int.
* Change the Effieciency talent to a "passive Aspect of the Viper".
* Change autoshot to automatically fire after every special in the same way as the "free auto" after Aimed we used to have, based on weapon speed. This would allow us to still weave shots auto-special-auto-special-auto etc, but without the possibility of clipping an auto because you hit your special half a second late.
* Make things like Unleashed Rage or Battle Shout affect RAP, and/or give other classes +% based buffs/debuffs that affect our damage, so we scale similarly with gear to casters.
* Make TSA scale with gear. The BM group buff (Ferocious Inspiration, +3% damage to your party) and the SV group buff (Expose Weakness, +AP equal to 25% of your agi for the whole raid) both scale, TSA will always be 125 AP even when everyone's in T6 or beyond and 125 is just a drop in the bucket.
* Change AP to RAP on gear. The +ranged attack power mod exists (though the Arena crossbow is the only endgame item that has it), and +RAP costs fewer statpoints than +AP for obvious reasons. Of course, you still have to have mail gear with +AP on it for enhancement shamans, but some of the mail could be changed this way (the Hunter tier sets could for sure), as well as ranged weapons with +AP and the various Hunter polearms out there.
* Buff Steady Shot. A couple of nice suggestions I've heard from this are to change the bizzare (and useless against un-dazeable bosses) +175 damage if the target is dazed to +175 damage if the target is Hunter's Marked or Stung; and/or changing the Barrage and Improved Barrage talents to affect Steady as well as Multi (which, finally, would be the end of Hunters being forced to use their skill for striking multiple targets at once when DPSing a single solitary mob).

The change to HM where we'll have 330 more RAP than before after charging it up is nice, but it's a band-aid fix - it doesn't scale, so even if it puts us at the level of other DPS in T5-level content now, get to the Black Temple or whatever's after that in a huge content patch 6 months from now and the other DPS will rise above us again.

One of the big problems is outlined in the last paragraph. Whatever they do to hunters now, as hunters scale so very badly with just about anything, will be undone pretty quick as well. Hunters need some real help, not some bandaid fixes. And I'd like to point out that the BM tree isn't seeing many problems because they are finally buffed up to the level of the other two. Which is good. It's about time. 3 viable trees is a great thing. But the problem (that I notice a lot of BM hunters don't see yet) is that all three specs are still at the bottom of the dps pile by a large margin (when put up against players of equal gear and skill this really shows). It's easy to be the top dps in a mixed group. Or a group that is not well balanced, or one that the RL hasn't bothered to put together very well for class synergy. But when it really matters, when it's down the wire and you realized that your group just can't beat that dps race boss...take a look at your raid composition, and I'd be willing to wager there's more than one hunter (which is all a raid needs/brings anymore) in it.

That's just not right. Not at all.

Oh, and making a massive chunk of our dps completely based on/screwed up by even a little bit of lag is utter bs, but I doubt they'll be looking at that one anytime soon.